Out of the box, the Pentium G3258 is able to extract the maximum amount of performance from the R9 285, hitting 31.4fps at 3.2GHz. This meant without any overclocking the Pentium G3258 was still 3% faster than the Athlon X4 860K at 4.4GHz.

Using the GTX 960 changes things quite a bit and here we see that both processors are able to deliver between 31 and 32fps regardless of clock speed.

Civilization: Beyond Earth is CPU intensive and as a result all four cores of the Athlon X4 860K were used heavily, resulting in a total CPU utilization of 90%. Despite the X4 860K working hard, it was still slower at 4.4GHz than the G3258 at just 3.2GHz. Once overclocked, the G3258 was 19% faster than the overclocked X4 860K.

Again, the GTX 960 works much better with the X4 860K and this time the G3258 was just 6% faster.

Total War Attila, like Civilization: Beyond Earth, is another CPU intensive game and the Athlon X4 860K remained above 70% utilization in our benchmark. Yet again, despite heavy four core utilization the X4 860K was still much slower than the Pentium G3258 when paired with the R9 285. This time the G3258 enjoyed a 15% performance advantage.

Whereas the Athlon X4 860K did well in Civilization: Beyond Earth once paired with the GTX 960, this isn’t true when testing with Total War Attila. In fact, the opposite happens, and here the Pentium G3258 is now 24% faster than the X4 860K when comparing the 4.4GHz overclocked configurations.

All four of the Athlon's cores were tapped with a total utilization of 60% in our Assassin's Creed Unity test, yet for some reason the chip's performance was extremely poor, allowing the Pentium to deliver a little over 50% more performance.

Things just got worse with the GTX 960 for AMD, as the Pentium G3258 was now 108% faster. We're not sure what's hurting the Athlon X4 860K in Assassin's Creed Unity.